Nkunda says he is fighting to protect fellow Tutsis and to combat corruption [AFP]

Civilians escaping clashes on Wednesday said the attacks had been started by pro-government Mai-Mai militiamen.

A second day of confused clashes raised fears of more fighting in Rutshuru, 70km north of Goma, the capital of the country's North Kivu province.

Rutshuru was seized last week by General Laurent Nkunda's Tutsi rebels who are fighting Congolese government forces.

Machinegun fire and the thump of artillery could be heard, the Reuters news agency reported.

One elderly man walking with a cane wore a shirt covered in dried blood from a bullet wound.

He said the Mai-Mai had shot him.
  
Hundreds of civilians sheltered at a ruined primary school close to a UN peacekeepers' camp. Smoke rose from nearby.

UN operation
  
UN peacekeepers said they had launched an operation around Kiwanja to try to halt the fighting.

They also said they would secure the release of a Belgian journalist working for a German newspaper, whom UN said had been seized by the Mai-Mai militiamen.

Obasanjo, the UN envoy to eastern Congo, is to mediate talks on the conflict

The North Kivu government army commander blamed the militia for the clashes and said his own forces would respect the ceasefire.
 
Nkunda said he was upholding the ceasefire he declared last week after halting his forces' advance towards Goma, where aid agencies are struggling to help some of an estimated million refugees displaced by two years of conflict in North Kivu.

"It's still being maintained," Nkunda told Reuters by telephone from his hilltop headquarters in North Kivu.

Crisis summit

Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said he would attend a Great Lakes summit on Friday in Kenya's capital Nairobi to address the crisis in the Congo.

He said he would meet Joseph Kabila, the Congolese president, and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagame, to try to urge them to speak with Nkunda and anyone else who could help end the crisis.

Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's former president who is Ban's newly nominated special envoy for east Congo, told Reuters he would meet both presidents in Nairobi to see how to end the violence.
  
"Do we need a stronger mandate or do we need a reassessment and redeployment to meet the challenges on the ground? ... the meeting I am having will clarify things a little bit," he said.

The conflict in eastern Congo, which persists years after the end of a wider 1998-2003 war, is fuelled by ethnic hatred left over from Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

Tutsis not protected

Nkunda claims the Congolese government has not protected ethnic Tutsis from the Rwandan Hutu militia that escaped to Congo after helping slaughter a half-million Rwandan Tutsis.

Nkunda, who defected from the army in 2004, now says he is fighting to liberate all of Congo from a corrupt government.

He went on the offensive on August 28 and brought his fighters to the edge of Goma last week before declaring a unilateral ceasefire.
  
Congo and Rwanda have accused each other of supporting feuding rebel and militia groups.

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